She would not be six months in Paris before I should be obliged to put her in the Temple or at Bicetre.

I should be sorry to do this, because it would make a noise and that would injure me in public Opinion." It makes but little difference whether she abstains from talking politics: "people talk politics in talking about literature, the fine arts and morality, about everything in the world; women should busy themselves with their knitting," and men keep silent or, if they do talk, let it be on a given subject and in the sense prescribed.
Of course, the inspection of publications is still more rigorous and more repressive, more exacting and more persistent .-- At the theatre, where the assembled spectators become enthusiastic through the quick contagion of their sensibilities, the police cut out of the "Heraclius" of Corneille and the "Athalie" of Racine[6256] from twelve to twenty-five consecutive lines and patch up the broken passages as carefully as possible with lines or parts of lines of their own .-- On the periodical press, on the newspaper which has acquired a body of readers and which exercises an influence and groups its subscribers according to an opinion, if not political, at least philosophic and literary, there is a compression which goes even as far as utter ruin.

From the beginning of the Consulate,[6257] sixty out of seventy-three political journals are suppressed; in 1811, the thirteen that still existed are reduced to four and the editors-in-chief are appointed by the minister of police.

The property of these journals, on the other hand, is confiscated, while the Emperor, who had taken it, concedes it, one third to his police and the other two thirds to people of the court or litterateurs who are his functionaries or his creatures.

Under this always aggravated system the newspapers, from year to year, become so barren that the police, to interest and amuse the public, contrive a pen warfare in their columns between one amateur of French music and one of Italian music.
Books, almost as rigorously kept within bounds, are mutilated or prevented from appearing.[6258] Chateaubriand is forbidden to reprint his "Essay on Revolutions," published in London under the Directory.